Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings (13 page)

On the way here, he found a beer cap that said Marco Polo Premium Lager so today his name is Marco Polo. He makes it very clear that tomorrow it will probably be something else.

“How does that work?” I ask.

“Nothing extraordinary. Yesterday I called myself Periyar.”

“Ok. After... Periyar.”

“No, after the bus service.”

We are sitting in the worn and shabby India Coffee House, discussing the purchase of Chellam, the talking cat.

“So what does he say?” asks Marco Polo.

“Wow,” I say.

“Really? Like how? How does he say it?”

“Like I ask him Chellam how do I look today and he goes wow.”

“Every time?”

“Yes.”

“Awesome. He probably has a mouse bone stuck in his throat or something.”

“He doesn’t eat mice.”

“Sure he does. Everyone does. What about fuckle?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Fuckle, would he say that?”

“Fuck who?”

“Fuckle, fuckle. It’s my new word. Guess what it means.”

“No idea.”

“Come on, just guess.”

“I don’t know. A tiny fuck.”

“Close. It’s what fairies do behind mushrooms.”

I think of a girl called Caroline, who refused to speak in English even though we all thought she should because her name was Caroline. One day I had heard her scream at a rickshaw driver “You jes’ fugg
awf
min. Fugg
awf!
” I was going to ask what was wrong but I was scared she would tell me to fugg
awf
too.

Marco Polo places the beer cap on the table, which is scratched and splotched with tiny islands of water. I’m surprised at how clean the bottle cap is. I wonder where he got it from.

“Think he would say it?” he asks.

“You mean like right now? Right now, no.”

“I could train him.”

“You could train him.”

“How much?”

“Five hundred bucks,” I say.

“Not for free then.”

“No. It’s a talking cat.”

Marco Polo nods and smiles. After he leaves I notice he’s left behind the beer cap. I pick it up, feeling the crimped edges bite into my skin like tiny teeth.
You jes’ fuggawf min. Jes’ fuggawf,
I say to myself. I drag out the final ‘f’ sound, lazily biting my lip. I wonder if someone is watching me, if they think I look preoccupied and sexy. I spin the bottle cap on the table and watch as it rolls onto the floor and disappears under the cash counter.

Senthil had two wallets. One was for receipts, business cards and on some occasions, money. The other one was for Amala’s suicide notes. The first one she ever gave him was wrapped around his watch and said:

Why stay alive at such a cost

When nothing’s gained

And nothing’s lost

And there’s a lump on my elbow

That looks like cancer

Goodbye.

He found her a few minutes later making tea in his kitchen.

“Well that’s lucky,” said Senthil. “I thought you were going to kill yourself.”

“No,” Amala said. “It’s just a habit. I tried writing poetry instead but it didn’t work.”

Amala placed these notes in important but insignificant places like the bottom of his coffee cup. Sometimes she would mail them to him, giving him the envelopes to drop in the mailbox for her.

“Why don’t I just open it now? It’s for me anyway,” he said.

“Don’t you like getting mail? I love getting mail,” said Amala.

Senthil kept every note she gave him. When he was on a long bus ride, he read them in chronological order and then backwards. On a good day, he liked to think they were love letters. On a bad day, he was sure she was already floating face down in the Cooum River.

•

Amala took him to her ancestral village because she felt it was important for him to see how decayed her history was.

“There are two reasons why nobody there will like you,” she told him on the bus. “One, we’re not married but we’re sleeping together.”

“How do they know that?”

“Two, you’re a low-caste…what are you again?”

“Nadar.”

“Right, you’re a low-caste Nadar. My grandfather had low-castes working in our fields but they weren’t allowed inside the house.”

“So I’m not allowed inside?”

“Ordinarily, no. But my grandfather’s dying so it doesn’t matter.”

Senthil fell asleep and dreamed that he was standing outside Amala’s ancestral home. It looked like a mouth crammed with broken teeth. An old man was standing in front of him, a thick, handlebar moustache writhing on his upper lip like a black snake. He started to poke holes into Senthil’s chest with a dusty umbrella.

“Stay away from my granddaughter,” thundered the old man, though the voice seemed to come from the house.

“Fuck you,” said Senthil, as the umbrella scraped against his spinal column. He woke up when the bus hit a pothole and snapped his head against the window. A thin film of dust had coated his mouth. In his hand was a note:

Only God says jump

So I’ll set the time

We should have bought a bottle of water

When the bus stopped

Goodbye.

“You slept with your mouth open,” said Amala. “You should never do that on a bus.”

•

The ancestral home looked weary and abandoned, in spite of the people that kept shuffling between the slivers of sunlight leaking through the ceiling. On arrival, Senthil was given a tumbler of warm buttermilk that was so sour it made his eyes water. They left their bags in a room that was stacked with broken wooden beds. Then Amala took him to see what was left of the property.

“Some Dalits want to build a school here,” she said. “They even asked if we were willing to sell. My grandfather doesn’t know about it though.”

“Why?”

“Are you kidding? Dalits are worse than Nadars. If he hears they want to buy this place, he’ll have a heart attack. His head will explode.”

There was a car shed with no car, stables filled with rusted bicycles and a field that was overflowing with holes and lumps of clay. Amala showed him everything like she was displaying someone else’s scars. Lastly, she took him to a large, abandoned well—the pottakennar.

“There’s still water in it,” said Senthil as he leaned over and peered inside. Puffs of warm, putrid air gently clung to his mouth and hair.

“All the soil sinks in whenever they try to fill it,” said Amala. “Six people have died in there. All women.”

“Wow.”

“The ladies in my family like to jump in wells. The men like to hang themselves.”

“Is it haunted?”

“I like to think so.”

They spent the rest of the day sitting on the only unbroken bed in their room. Senthil found an old radio and began fiddling with it while Amala sorted through newspapers, trying to find something to read. She finally gave up and rummaged through her handbag for a paper and pencil. After staring out the window for a few seconds, she scribbled something down and stuck the note in Senthil’s pocket.

There’s something I’ve learned

That you feel it

When they take it away

All these broken beds

Are bringing me down.

Goodbye.

“We could leave if you want,” said Senthil as he folded the note into four.

“No,” said Amala. “It’s just the beds. I wish we could burn them and go home.”

Senthil found a Sri Lankan radio station playing old Tamil movie songs. The announcer read a long list of dedications that had three Senthils, one Senthilmurthy, one Senthilnathan and no Amalas.

“I love the way they talk, don’t you?” said Amala.

“Who?”

“Sri Lankan Tamils. It’s like they’re trying to sing but their voice never quite takes off.”

They listened to songs about how the heart was like an unanchored boat, how the future was filled with promise but the past was filled with tears. Voices kept weaving in and out of thick clouds of static until the entire station disappeared completely in the middle of a song about the moon.

“Stupid Sri Lankan stations,” mumbled Amala as Senthil switched off the radio. In the evening, a plump, sad woman brought them half a cup of tea each and apologized that there was nothing to eat with it.

“But we’ve got some nice fish for the night,” she said, “Unless you’ve become vegetarian. In which case—”

The plump woman shrugged and smiled sadly. Senthil wanted to assure her that he wasn’t vegetarian but she left before he could say anything.

Dinner was a silent and scattered affair. Everyone else in the house seemed to prefer eating in the kitchen and Senthil could hear the soft murmurs of their conversation humming around the kitchen door. Senthil, Amala and a small girl were the only ones in the dining room. The fish was soft and reeked of decay, even though it was drowned in a fierce and pungent gravy. Senthil decided to have rice with curd instead, though there was no pickle to go with it. The small girl sat on the opposite side of the table, gazing intently at Senthil with large, mournful eyes.

“Your niece?” asked Senthil.

“Who knows?” shrugged Amala. “What’s your name?”

The girl shifted her mournful stare to Amala.

“Tell me your name,” said Amala as she sucked on a fish bone, “or I’ll toss you into the pottakennar.”

The girl quietly got up and left. She seemed to teeter from side to side, as if she was still learning how to bend her knees.

“I think there’s something wrong with her,” said Senthil.

“She’s probably drunk,” said Amala. “Either that or she has polio.”

•

The next day, Amala took Senthil to see her grandfather. He was asleep, breathing noisily through his mouth.

“We tried to give him a bath once,” said Amala, “You know, just to see if it would tire him out so he would die? But he didn’t—it’s like he’s staying alive to annoy everybody.”

Amala poked the old man in the shoulder.

“Thatha?” she said loudly. “Thatha this is Senthil. You don’t have to talk to him, just look at him.”

They waited a few seconds. Then she lifted the old man’s withered, yellow hand and pressed it into Senthil’s face.

“What are you doing?” said Senthil.

“Let him feel your face.”

“Why?”

“Just—”

The old man’s hand dropped to the bed and Amala rolled her eyes.

“Well then
look
at him Thatha,” snapped Amala. “Just open your eyes for a second.”

“What’s the point in doing this when he’s sleeping?”

“He’s not sleeping. He’s just being difficult.”

The old man’s breath rattled lightly and then settled. Senthil caught a muted, stale perfume coming from the old man’s clothes.

“He smells like lavender,” whispered Senthil.

“He’s very fond of Yardley. Come on, we’ll try again tomorrow.”

“An old brown man who smells like an old white woman,” murmured Senthil.

“What?”

“Nothing. I was thinking that Polio Girl must be his great-granddaughter. It’s a shame you don’t know who she is.”

“I don’t think anybody knows who she is,” said Amala as she got up.

•

The next day the old man looked remarkably the same, breathing loudly through his mouth while a dying smudge of lavender hung over the bed. The Polio Girl was sitting in the doorway, scribbling on the floor with a piece of green chalk.

“Shouldn’t you be in school or something?” asked Senthil as they passed her. He tried to ruffle her hair but it stuck to his fingers like clumps of damp feathers.

“Maybe it’s not polio,” said Amala. “Maybe she’s retarded.”

This time, they each held one of the old man’s hands. Amala told her grandfather about how she had met Senthil, how he slept with his mouth open on the bus. Senthil noticed the old man’s hands were warm and surprisingly soft.

“Thatha!” snapped Amala. “Either you open your eyes or I’ll… I’ll...”

“She’ll throw you in the pottakennar,” whispered Senthil. Amala turned and stared at him.

“What?” said Senthil.

“Why would you say something like that?”

“It was a joke. You said it to the Polio Girl.”

“Does my grandfather look like the Polio Girl to you?”

Senthil got up and made his way to the door.

“I’ll just leave him a note, how about that,” he said over his shoulder. “I’m the one fucking your granddaughter. Best regards—”

Senthil tripped over the Polio Girl in the doorway and fell, smashing his mouth against the dusty, tiled floor. He felt a trickle of blood collect on his tongue—his teeth seemed to be humming softly, like they had been electrocuted. He wiped his mouth and looked up.

“I’m alright,” he said. “I think I chipped my tooth though.”

“Well get up then, you’re stepping all over the Polio Girl, for God’s sake,” said Amala.

•

Amala spent the rest of the day talking to her grandfather. Senthil watched her from the doorway; sometimes she walked around the room, speaking in English and touching the backs of chairs. Sometimes she would sit beside her grandfather, rocking back and forth, murmuring in Tamil. Senthil thought she looked very small and far away, like he was seeing her through the wrong end of a telescope.

“Well?” said Amala. “Are you coming in?”

“You look like you’re at the bottom of a well,” said Senthil.

“Is that a yes or a no?”

“No.”

“Will you come in later?”

“I’ll come in when he’s awake.”

“But he is awake. He’s just being difficult.”

“I’ll come in when he’s not being difficult then.” Senthil spent the rest of the day wandering the grounds. He tried to pull a bicycle free from the rusty snarl in the stables but gave up when a wheel fell off and rolled away. He ended up at the pottakennar, dropping in leaves and watching them disappear into the dark water. Nothing floated—not even a scrap of cigarette foil. Senthil decided this was due to some complicated form of underwater physics which he couldn’t understand. When he ran out of things to throw, he opened his wallet and sifted through the worn sheets of paper inside: